COMPARATIVE DRAMA最新文献

{"title":"The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing by Serena Laiena (review)","authors":"Erith Jaffe-Berg","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950198","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing</em> by Serena Laiena <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Erith Jaffe-Berg (bio) </li> </ul> Serena Laiena. <em>The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing</em>. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2023. 264 Pp. 264 + 4 color and 4 b/w figures + 2 tables. $163.00 hardback, $52.95 paperback, $52.95 eBook. <p>In <em>The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing</em> Serena Laiena focuses on the rise of the power couple of the <em>commedia dell’arte</em>. She contends that the <em>comici</em> used their marital status to their advantage by marketing themselves as couples, tag-teaming in order to advance each other’s agendas. The status of couple increased the actors’ reputations artistically and also appealed to powerful religious and political figures. In this way, Laiena argues, <em>commedia dell’arte</em> created a fame-building machine and laid a foundation for stardom that is still resonant today. In her accessible narration, she draws on multiple disciplines, including theatre history, performance studies, Italian studies, celebrity studies, and gender studies. This interdisciplinary approach builds on scholarship about the Italian diva, in such works as Rosalind Kerr’s <em>The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage</em> and Pamela Allen Brown’s <em>The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata</em>, interweaving an understanding of how the actors navigated Counter-Reformation Catholic resurgence to their advantage by foregrounding their relationships.</p> <p>In the first chapter, Laiena sets the stage of post-Tridentine Italy, a place in which religious figures such as Cardinal Borromeo and Giovan Domenico Ottonelli waged war on the theatre by casting it as a corrupting influence. Professional actresses were the main target of clerical censure, personifying their detractors’ criticism of licentious presentation and inducing moralistic condemnation. Despite this, the ever-defiant divas flaunted their sexual appeal and resisted censure, thriving on their public’s interest. Nevertheless, the divas were not impervious to condemnation, and the couple identity offered the actresses a means of pushing back on the moralizing admonitions they faced. More than just a safety net, as Laiena argues, the actresses used their status strategically, along with other methods of self-fashioning as artists and intellectuals. The following chapters unfold how they did this.</p> <p>Laiena’s second chapter offers a bird’s eye view of the phenomenon by chronicling ten theatre couples, mining various sources for details about the ways they individually enhanced each other’s fame as a strategy for mutual benef","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530–1699: The Imagined Empire by Chloë Houston (review)","authors":"Bernadette Andrea","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950197","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530–1699: The Imagined Empire</em> by Chloë Houston <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Bernadette Andrea (bio) </li> </ul> Chloë Houston. <em>Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530–1699: The Imagined Empire</em> Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. xii + 295 + 1 b/w illus. $129.99 hardback, $109.99 eBook. <p>With increasing attention in early modern studies to English representations of Persia/Iran—both as an “imaginative geography” (to borrow Edward Said’s concept from <em>Orientalism</em>) transmitted via translations of classical Greek sources and as a vibrant economic, military, and political empire coeval with England’s nascent global ambitions—Houston’s book is the first to offer a synoptic view of dramatic renderings from the early decades of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. This time span covers the initial stirrings of the English Reformation, the anxious transition to a “female king” with Elizabeth I, some of the earliest English travelers in Safavid Iran and their quixotic attempt to establish an Anglo-Persian alliance, the political challenges pre- and post-Interregnum, and the constitutional crisis pre- and post-Glorious Revolution. While assessing plays that have received more critical attention — such as Christopher Marlowe’s <em>Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2</em> (1587–88) and John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins’s <em>The Travailes of the Three English Brothers</em> (1607)—Houston also adduces lesser known writers and genres to give a fuller picture of English understandings of “Persia,” both ancient (Achaemenid) and contemporary (Safavid). This breadth of engagement with English drama in the period—including interludes, closet drama, and stage plays—makes for a book that anyone who deals with any portion of the early modern Anglo-Persian encounter should consult.</p> <p>Chapter 1, “Introduction: The Imagined Empire,” maps out this vast terrain starting with the itinerary of Robert Brancetour, a man born in England who, in the 1530s, travelled to the court of the Safavid shah, Tahmasp I, as part of a multicultural caravan to propose an alliance against the Ottoman Turks. His partner, who died <em>en route</em>, was an Italian. After completing this journey, Brancetour worked for the Holy Roman emperor, Charles V, who was also king of Spain. Ten years later, the English king, Henry VIII, through his ambassador, Sir Thomas Wyatt, sought the return of Brancetour. As Houston explains, “Brancetour was viewed as a traitor because he had attempted to incite some Englishmen in Spain to rebel against Henry” during the fraught decades that saw Henry’s break with the Church of Rome (4). Charles V knew Brancetour as “he that hath been in Perse,” and refused to repatriate him to England for punishmen","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"25 152 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama by Jon D Rossini (review)","authors":"Camilla Stevens","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950200","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama</em> by Jon D Rossini <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Camilla Stevens (bio) </li> </ul> Jon D Rossini. <em>Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama</em>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024. Pp. 254. $75.00 hardback, $29.95 paperback, eBook open access. <p><em>Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama</em> illuminates how Puerto Rican playwrights writing in the United States are thinking through an emancipatory practical politics in response to enduring colonialism, systemic racism, and inequity. Assembling a corpus of play texts from mainly the last three decades, Rossini identifies how Puerto Rican diasporic drama offers a critique of the status quo framing of the Puerto Rican political status debate, as well as a critique of the costs of violent revolution. In different ways, the staged stories Rossini attends to suggest pragmatic moves and positions that shape action toward sustainable and enduring liberation. <em>Pragmatic Liberation</em> thus serves as a meditation on the power of dramaturgical writing in producing theoretical reflections on political action, while at the same time it provides a genealogy of contemporary Puerto Rican drama written in the United States.</p> <p>The book addresses an impressive range of over a dozen dramatists. Rossini does the important work of recognizing the foundational impact of pioneers such as René Marqués and Miriam Colón on the development of mainland Puerto Rican drama; he includes the better-known Puerto Rican playwrights in the contemporary Latine theatre landscape—José Rivera, Migdalia Cruz, and Carmen Rivera; and he incorporates newer voices such as Nelson Díaz-Marcano, Kristoffer Díaz, and Desi Moreno-Penson as well. Last but not least, the manuscript engages consistently with perhaps the most important current voice in U.S. Puerto Rican dramaturgy: Quiara Alegría Hudes.</p> <p>Rossini draws upon a wide range of thinkers from the fields of dramatic theory and criticism, politics, and Puerto Rican Studies. The introduction and conclusion are lively bookends and offer provocative examples that help prepare the reader’s engagement with the study’s theoretical framing. Rossini argues that Puerto Rican playwrights in the United States speak “from a complex, explicitly structured set of political marginalities” (5) and use drama “to trace pathways toward real change, the complex ambivalence and conversations that are necessary to advance thinking and begin the movement toward forms of emancipation while continuing to sustain life” (5). Rossini convincingly argues that dramaturgical writing is particularly well suited for envisioning change because it is predicated on acknowledging the “given circumstances” that condit","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race, and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed (review)","authors":"John Saillant","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950199","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race, and Popular Performance</em> by Peter P. Reed <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John Saillant (bio) </li> </ul> Peter P. Reed. <em>Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race, and Popular Performance</em>. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp xii + 216. $99.99 hardback. <p>Peter P. Reed’s <em>Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America</em> is essential reading for those interested in performance studies, black body studies, nineteenth-century American theatre, and the Anglo-American repercussions of the Haitian Revolution. Five chapters analyze a 1795 play about white Haitian refugees who fled the Revolution for the USA; an 1804 debate between two white students who adopted the voices of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines; an 1821 English play about the life of Haitian King Henry Christophe; American minstrel and British burlesque versions of Haitianness; and mid-century American abolitionists who made Louverture both a celebrity and a floating signifier that reflected their own various self-understandings. An introduction maps Reed’s scholarly debts and his theoretical framework, while a conclusion argues for Herman Melville’s 1855 <em>Benito Cereno</em> as an engagement with more than half a century of the theatre of the Haitian Revolution.</p> <p>Performance and the embodiment of racial identity provide the structure of Reed’s argument. He offers many references to Haiti in nineteenth-century America that use the language of theatre or that are performances of theatre, and he treats actors, orators, and audiences of different races as they responded to Haiti in depth or in passing. Some of these are new archival finds while others are familiar. They also suggest that the language of theatre came easily to pen and tongue in a way it no longer does. Yet his crucial innovation is the argument that the Haitian Revolution held a special power that led Americans to perform it again and again for almost a century. These performances ran the gamut from abolitionist to proslavery, pro-Haiti to antiblack, and often they supplanted and displaced Haitians as the idea of the Haitian Revolution became an instrument to articulate an idea of America. The power to compel performance must be understood. It derived from the proximity in time and place of the Haitian Revolution to the American War of Independence, near enough to suggest an alternative and unsettling form of revolution for the early republic. And it derived, probably more so, from the performance of embodied race that was inevitably linked to colonial American and postrevolutionary slavery. A race-based slave system induces individuals to perform an embodied racial identity. In the United States, this spread beyond slavery and survived abolition.","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"I want a bath!\": On the Depth and Limits of Universalist Liquefaction in Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice","authors":"Michel Büch","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950194","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> “I want a bath!”: <span>On the Depth and Limits of Universalist Liquefaction in Sarah Ruhl’s <em>Eurydice</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michel Büch (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>S</strong>arah Ruhl’s early play <em>Eurydice</em> (2003) is a liquefied version of the well-known myth. Set in an underwaterworld, her adaptation overflows with affect and undulates our understanding of sexuality, family bonds, and agency. Two recurring points dominate the substantial scholarly and journalistic debate around the play: the argument that it grants agency to a traditionally objectified figure (Eurydice), and the interpretation of its themes through the Jungian lens of the Electra complex. While both readings have merit and are not inherently contradictory, they tend to complicate and offset one another. Moreover, both risk reducing the play to fixed frames of reference, overlooking its broader artistic and thematic dimensions. In this essay, I step away from these conventional approaches to focus on the role of water as metaphor, material, and mindset within the drama. I consider the play’s text alongside its 2024 staging by the <strong>[End Page 406]</strong> University Players, a student ensemble at the University of Hamburg. I take my cue from Joanne Stroud’s foreword to Bachelard’s <em>Water and Dreams</em>, which encourages readers to “read images centrifugally [like] the ripples from a center point, constantly expanding our way of seeing.”<sup>1</sup> I allow myself to sink into the motives and visual elements that provoke perceptive experiences, rather than focusing on how the play or a character develops or what a specific image means. I hope this method allows a more organic engagement with the play and its production—one that resists the reductive tendencies of rigid methodologies. This approach is inspired by the pragmatic Deweyan shift from <em>recognition</em> to <em>perception</em> and enables us to look at what the play does rather than what the critic knows. By embracing this flexibility and vulnerability, I aim to contribute not only to the study of <em>Eurydice</em> but to the broader critique of its axiomatic ground, questioning the universalism that underlies both the play and the discourse it has inspired.</p> <p>Though a modernized version with additional characters and elements (the Father, the stones as a chorus), Ruhl’s aqueous play does maintain the central plot points of the traditional tale: the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice’s accidental death (in some tellings a consequence of fleeing from her rapist, which is evoked in Ruhl’s play), Orpheus’s lamentations and katabasis into the underworld (where he charms Hades and Persephone with his music), and the subsequent bargain that Orpheus and Eurydice can return to the world of the living on the condition that he does not turn to look at he","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"The Bible say\": August Wilson's Scriptural Improvisation","authors":"Patrick Maley","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950195","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> “The Bible say”: <span>August Wilson’s Scriptural Improvisation</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Patrick Maley (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>V</strong>ery early in August Wilson’s career—in the opening scene direction to <em>Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom</em>—the playwright puts his work in dialogue with the Bible:</p> <blockquote> <p>Chicago in 1927 is a rough city, a bruising city, a city of millionaires and derelicts, gangsters and roughhouse dandies, whores and Irish grandmothers who move through its streets fingering long black rosaries. Somewhere a man is wrestling with the taste of a woman in his cheek. Somewhere a dog is barking. Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.<sup>1</sup></p> </blockquote> <p>The rosary beads evoke post-biblical Christianity, but the thirty pieces of silver point directly to the Bible. The reference is to Matthew 26:14–16, where Jerusalem’s chief priests secure Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for that price. In Matthew, the sum likely refers back to Exodus 21:32, which establishes remuneration for an injured slave: “If the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall pay to the slaveowner thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.”<sup>2</sup> The chief priests therefore include an implicit insult in their price, essentially buying Jesus for the price of an injured slave. After Judas later returns the silver and hangs himself, the chief priests, finding it unlawful to deposit blood money in the treasury, use the bounty to buy land for burying dead foreigners (Matthew 27:7-10). The priests desire Judas’s betrayal but refuse to imbue Jesus with any significant value.</p> <p>Wilson’s Chicago moon shatters into indiscriminate blood money: thirty pieces of silver lying below a non-descript window. Having descended through a window, the moon offers no light, becoming instead the potential means of the sort of betrayal, disrespect, regret, self-loathing, <strong>[End Page 435]</strong> and death found in Matthew that could happen in Chicago’s darkness. That is, if somebody should find the money and put it to the use that Wilson’s allusion suggests. Although Wilson’s past tense makes clear that the violent transformation of the natural world into blood money has already occurred, betrayal is uncertain. The money could remain unfound, be collected and put to a different use, or fund betrayal in precisely the fashion of the biblical antecedent. Wilson’s allusion thus enriches his play by reference to scripture, but signifies on biblical themes, wrenching the gospel story into the modern setting through a long human and aesthetic history that leaves scars. Matthew’s story resonates in Wilson’s world, but it is irreparably altered, rendered indeterminate and mysterious. By offering a rich web of allusions stretching to ancient Hebrew scripture, the ","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950202","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong>Bernadette Andrea</strong> is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies and the Department of Feminist Studies. She is the author of <em>The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture</em> (2017) and <em>Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature</em> (2007). Her edited books include <em>Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World</em>, with Patricia Akhimie (2019); <em>English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707</em> (2012); and <em>Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds</em>, with Linda McJannet (2011). She has served as coeditor, with Julie D. Campbell and Allyson M. Poska, of <em>Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal</em> (2017–2024), and as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2022–2023).</p> <p><strong>Michel Büch</strong> is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg. His interdisciplinary research bridges theatre and performance studies with critical race theory, psychoanalysis, affect theory, and neuroscience to enable a thorough critique of modernity and its lived realities today. Drawing on extensive experience in dramaturgy and cultural management, Büch uniquely integrates rigorous scholarship with practical theatre expertise and collaboration with academics and theatre professionals in his teaching. He is the author of <em>Whiteface: Antiblackness and Improv Comedy</em> (2022) and serves as production manager for the University Players.</p> <p><strong>Jiamiao Chen (</strong>陈佳苗<strong>)</strong> is a PhD candidate in the English Department of the University of Bristol. Her research interests include late medieval and early modern drama, medieval hagiography, and Geocriticism.</p> <p><strong>Erith Jaffe-Berg</strong> is Professor of Theatre at the Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production at the University of California at Riverside. Her research focuses on the <em>commedia dell’arte</em> and performances by minority groups in Early Modern Italy. She is the author of <em>Jewish Theatre Making in Mantua, 1520–1650</em> (2022), <em>Commedia dell’Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping “Others”</em> (2015), and <em>The Multilingual Theatre of Commedia dell’Arte</em> (2008). She has published essays on early modern performance in journals such as <em>I Tatti Studies</em>, <em>Theatre Survey</em>, <em>Early Theatre</em>, and <em>The Journal of Dramatic Theatre and Criticism</em>. She has contributed to various anthologies, most recently <em>The Palgrave Handbook on Theatre and Migration</em> (2024), the <em>Routledge Encyclopedia of the Rena","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying by Daniel Sack (review)","authors":"Peta Tait","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950201","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying</em> by Daniel Sack <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Peta Tait (bio) </li> </ul> Daniel Sack. <em>Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying</em>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024. Pp. 214 pages + 13 photos. $80.00 hardback, $29.95 paperback, $29.95 eBook. <p><em>Cue Tears</em> poses fundamental questions about human expression and communication through a discussion of crying and tears in the visual and performing arts, particularly in theatrical performance. “How do performers cue their tears?”, and “What does it mean to witness another crying?” As Daniel Sack points out in his thoughtful, wide-ranging, and engaging discussion, crying and tears are not the same, although they often coincide. The use of breath and voice to cry may suffice on stage whether tears flow or not, but a camera close-up expects tears. Sack astutely explores the rich social and philosophical domain of crying and tears and the ways in which these can range from an appreciation of the sincerity of the theatrical purpose to recognition of duplicitous persuasion. Sack describes the uncertainty surrounding tears for an actor, since they are not easily willed, and claims, “My tears act alongside me” (2). His book is personal and remembered as well as well-researched and persuasive, and his thinking about tears has much to offer performance studies as well as a wider readership.</p> <p>The type of theoretical questions asked by those of us with a background in acting do often differ. An actor knows that emotional expression is central to all performance and that its challenges are so often overlooked in reception. Emotions are an expressive hurdle that every performer must repeatedly manage and audiences look for as indicators of value. For example, the problem of performing pain and sadness to have an effect presumes some crying and/or tears. But then, as Sack explains, crying can mean howling in pain or in laughter, and tears might arise from frustration.</p> <p>If crying is a dynamic expressive process, tears are the visual cue that is assumed to resonate with perceptions of actual feeling. Both are theatrically meaningful and therefore assumed to be indicators of feeling. Contradictions abound, however, when tears are indicators of honesty and authenticity and assumed to reveal much more than speech can explain. The Introduction to <em>Cue Tears</em> succinctly raises these complexities and their implications within an overview of thinking about tears.</p> <p>The crying of a baby might suggest that humans are hard-wired to respond to crying if not also tears. Sack accepts that tears “cue” responses in others, sometimes intensely. They reveal hidden depths of a person—or do they? Tears are bodily processes whether from the stirring of memories about past events or the cutting of an onion. But s","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender and Pilgrimage in The Digby Mary Magdalene","authors":"Jiamiao Chen","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a950196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a950196","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Gender and Pilgrimage in The Digby <em>Mary Magdalene</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jiamiao Chen (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>T</strong>he Digby <em>Mary Magdalene</em>, one of the most theatrically and theologically ambitious plays in the corpus of early English drama, is also one of the most complex in terms of its textual and performance history.<sup>1</sup> Based on linguistic evidence, scholars generally suggest that the play was written in East Anglia in the late fifteenth century, and that the surviving manuscript was produced in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.<sup>2</sup> Further, the extant text seems to reflect an imagined—and very likely realized—use of medieval <em>locus</em> and <em>platea</em> staging techniques: in this arrangement, the plural <em>loca</em> are scaffolds which, as Robert Weimann writes, “delimit a more or less fixed and focused scenic unit,” while the <em>platea</em> provides “an entirely nonrepresentational and unlocalized setting” where the characters can “[rub] shoulders with the plebeian audience.”<sup>3</sup> While the precise number of locations presented by the play remains disputed, scholars generally recognize its grand scale; the play was clearly designed to impress and engage its potential audience.<sup>4</sup> John Coldewey has suggested that the play was likely performed at the Chelmsford festival in 1562—a suggestion which, if correct, would demonstrate its lasting literary and theatrical appeal.<sup>5</sup></p> <p>Whatever its reception by early audiences, the play did not initially impress modern scholars of medieval drama. Incorporating both the biblical narrative and apocryphal legend relating to the life and death of the heroine and containing episodes probably borrowed from mystery plays and morality plays, the play is hybrid, episodic, and sprawling in form and content.<sup>6</sup> Such qualities proved frustrating for many mid-twentieth century scholars, including Arnold Williams, who lamented, “Characterization, the interplay of character and situation, the purposeful <strong>[End Page 460]</strong> selection of incident to embody theme, of these it has scarcely any.”<sup>7</sup> Yet since the mid-twentieth century, scholars have sought to better understand and appreciate the play’s sophisticated design by studying it in its medieval contexts and judging its aesthetic merits on its own terms. For instance, John W. Velz finds “sovereignty” a unifying theme for this play, while Victor I. Scherb suggests that the play is unified “through the repetitive symbolic action of the <em>nuntius</em> figure.”<sup>8</sup> Although criticizing such attempts to find unifying themes and motifs in the Digby <em>Mary Magdalene</em>, Scott Boehnen also establishes, in effect, a form of unity within the play, specifically by drawing attention to its exploration of different","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In Memoriam: Clifford O. Davidson: 1932–2024","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cdr.2024.a936316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2024.a936316","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> In Memoriam<span>Clifford O. Davidson: 1932–2024</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>In Memoriam</p> <p>Clifford O. Davidson</p> <p>(1932–2024)</p> <p></p> <p><strong>W</strong>hen Clifford Davidson retired from Western Michigan University in 2003, the Medieval Institute, where he held a joint appointment with English for nearly 40 years, printed a short volume of essays in his honor. If you read the introduction penned by Barbara Palmer, you learn about a person who was a prolific scholar, a persuasive editor, an intellectual trailblazer, and an energetic cheerleader. In retirement, Davidson remained close to the many institutions at the University that he played a leadership role in founding and nurturing, including this journal, still housed within the Department of English. Moreover, he left a global network of scholars who form, in part, his generous legacy of editorial and field leadership.</p> <p>Born October 29, 1932, Clifford Davidson attended one-room rural elementary schools near Faribault, Minnesota and later Brainerd (Minnesota) High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from St. Cloud State University and pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, with interruptions during which he taught at the secondary <strong>[End Page 280]</strong> level and served in the U.S. Army, the latter as a post newspaper editor at the Granite City (Illinois) Engineer Depot. He moved to Michigan in 1959 to complete his graduate studies at Wayne State University, from which he received his Ph.D. and where he also was employed as an Instructor in English.</p> <p>Davidson received an appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University in 1965, and two years later helped to establish this journal, which he served as a co-editor for 32 years. As an active participant in the development of the Medieval Institute at the University, he saw it grow into an internationally recognized unit which would in time sponsor the largest annual medieval conference in the world. In 1976 he founded the Early Drama, Art, and Music research project and book series within the Medieval Institute and served as its director for a quarter of a century. He also assisted his wife, the musicologist and gifted soprano Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, as dramatic director of numerous medieval music-dramas presented by the Society for Old Music (now Early Music Michigan), of which she was the founder and director.</p> <p>His research, conducted in American and European libraries and archives, led to voluminous publications and an international reputation with his articles and reviews published on four continents. He was the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than forty books and monographs, among them such titles as <em>From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of M","PeriodicalId":39600,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE DRAMA","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}